In a manner similar to personal computers and laptops, business enterprises increasingly rely on mobile and handheld devices. Indeed, the capabilities and uses of mobile devices have moved beyond voice communications and personal information management applications to a variety of communications- and business-related functions including email, browsing, instant messaging, enterprise applications, and video applications. For example, the functionality of many mobile devices have been extended to include cellular and wireless local area network (WLAN) communications interfaces, as well as virtual private network (VPN) and other client applications. Furthermore, mobile devices used in enterprises may also include enterprise applications used by workers in the field or otherwise.
Deployment, management and configuration of mobile and handheld devices in enterprise environments, however, present certain challenges. For example, the vast and constantly changing variety of mobile device types, functions and capabilities presents challenges to configuration, provisioning and troubleshooting. Moreover, the increasing capabilities and integration of mobile devices present challenges to network security.
Various management systems have been developed to remotely manage mobile devices in an enterprise environment, including, for example, data protection and synchronization, device security, application deployment, etc. A few such management systems employ the concept of a virtual device or virtual device domain, where a device management system maintains data associated with one or more mobile devices and allows users to change the data for the mobile device. The device management system synchronizes the data maintained for the mobile device and the data stored on the mobile device itself to help remotely manage the mobile devices. The virtual mobile devices maintained by such device management systems, however, are merely snapshot images of their corresponding physical mobile devices, representing the states of corresponding physical mobile devices at a particular instant. These virtual mobile devices are not executable entities that emulate the operations and/or functionalities of the physical mobile device.